[Imc-web] Advertising, Plain and Simple

[Arun Bhalla]

Some Web pages suggest blocking user agents which are known spambots.
It might work for some cases, but likely not all.  If I were a spammer,
I'd set the spambot's user agent to Mozilla, which would make it harder
to detect and block spambots.

A more general solution, and common to popular Web sites, is adding a
CAPTCHA (see http://www.captcha.net/) to forms.  With a CAPTCHA, a
user would have to type in an extra field (the word that is distorted
within a given image), and that is all.  The challenge is intended to
be difficult for computers to read but trivial for humans to see.
It's something that's bound to be essential in dada, but I don't know
when it might be included in dada.  It might not be too hard for us to
customize dada to support a Captcha PHP module or write something
that's somewhat simplistic.

Arun

Mike Lehman writes:
> Looks like the latest trend in spam has arrived at our IMC. We have been 
> bombarded by ads for viagra, home loans, etc. over the last few days, 
> which are all the same, except for the article titles. I am a little 
> behind on letting people know about what I'm doing with this due to 
> having to struggle with the power failure here at home, but I have saved 
> one copy of this offending material and have been totally deleting the 
> rest, as I see little point in saving them and because it's quicker than 
> just hiding them.
> 
> Maiko told me that this has been happening on blogs and other such 
> web-based posting forums and that this is all suspected as being 
> automated. Sometimes they show up singly, but more often in batches of 
> half a dozen or so.
> 
> My guess there is no easy technical fix to this, i.e. IP blocking, but 
> if there is, we should consider it. In the meantime, they are all going 
> to the memory hole.
> Mike Lehman
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--
Arun Bhalla